ENWORKS, in Manchester, is a unique environmental advice and support service that helps companies in the north west of England to make better use of increasingly scarce resources. Since 2007, with co-financing from the European Regional Development Fund, it has advised 4 000 small businesses, helping them to make annual savings of more than €16 million through resource efficiency, to cut 34 000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, and to create or save 967 jobs. ENWORKS shows how green innovation can boost productivity, cut costs and increase profits.

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1.Interviews

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Samantha Nicholson, Programmes Director: ENWORKS demonstrates that the environment is an important business issue. We help companies to save money, through reducing their use of energy, water and materials, and to turn environmental risks, such as resource price volatility, into business opportunities. The Stern Review identified climate change as the most significant market failure in history. It naturally follows from this that SMEs don’t fully understand how their business impacts on the environment, what environmental risks may well affect their business activities or what the financial benefits of improved environmental performance could be. Most commonly, SMEs see the environment as something separate to their core activities and as an additional business cost rather than a business opportunity. ENWORKS has received a number of rounds of European funding, without which we would not have been able to deliver the support that we have to companies across the northwest of England.

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Shaun Hugues, Managing Director of Cleanbake: With the support of ENWORKS we have been able to look very closely at our continuous improvement programme, which we run throughout the business. We’ve looked for environmental benefits and we’ve taken any number of those which have allowed us to put cost saving and efficiency benefits back into how we run our business at Cleanbake.Initially it was quite difficult to understand what were the right objectives to set for an environmental agenda with the business. When I joined the business in 2008 I realized that environmental matters, whilst on the agenda, were not being delivered. So, effectively, the initial dialogue with Groundwork was basically to say right, with a business of this nature, with the processes that we’ve got, what are the things that we should target and then, once we know how to target them, what is the best and most cost-effective way of targeting them as we go forward? As a result of that, we’ve, over a period of time, built up a programme with Groundwork of environmental improvements that we can feed into the business but always with one eye on the fact that we’re looking for cost-effective solutions in the longer term. In my experience, the balance of SMEs, when confronted with environmental issues, feel that it’s a cost that is going to come into the business which is not necessarily going to give them a benefit and I think most SMEs struggle with the capital outlay that you often need to make to introduce the environmental benefits. They also maybe don’t fully understand the corporate importance of putting in those environmental improvements. But the key thing for an SME is always what is the cost base, short-term cost base, to my business? Whereas larger businesses can often take a longer term view, an SME is always struggling with a more short-term cost base view. So it’s always a balancing act between cost and benefit. And when the cost benefit is going to come through. The environmental benefit is immediate but the cost benefit takes a little bit longer to come through on an SME.

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Paul Kirwan, Shop floor worker: The process we use now is much different because we use less solvent and this has streamlined things down for us a great deal. We have to handle the equipment fewer times now. We’re having just to go to the store the one time because of the coating, it lasts for 12 months. It’s a long-life coating on it where before it was like a glaze coating so we’d have to travel to and back from the store with their own equipment but now the equipment, as a whole, it all gets used for every single store now. So we use it on-going instead of just using their own equipment.

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Darren Beard, Facilities and Quality Manager: My name’s Darren Bird and I work alongside the facilities’ manager and also the quality manager on their daily tasks. My job involves basically checking daily for chemical stocks to make sure there’s enough stock to help the production and also to keep check of the water treatment that helps recycle dirty water that’s coming out of the factory, to reuse it. The training I’ve received for looking after the water treatment is day-to-day maintenance, the changing of filters, making sure that there’s enough water coming into the system, and that the inside filter is also clean, which helps suck more water through.The benefit is it’s helping the environment a lot by recycling water so that it doesn’t have to be treated and also using less energy to heat up an extra oven. It’s quite cost effective as well but also helping the environment out at the same time. I do enjoy my job a lot. Looking after the water treatments and seeing how the water is reused and cleaned. It’s quite a good thing to be involved in.